4 Tips to Improve Your Interview Skills

Improving your interview skills is one of the best possible
ways of improving your confidence, as well as your performance. It's
all too common for people who are otherwise excellent candidates to
sabotage themselves with poor interview performance caused by lack of
confidence.

Another common problem is giving unstructured, messy, interview
answers. That's usually the result of lack of interview training, but
there's a lot you can do to fix the problem yourself.

Finding and fixing interview problems

The best way to pin down interview issues is to ask yourself a few questions:

Do you find yourself garbling answers to questions where you know the answer well?

Do you sometimes get your interview answers out of sequence?

Do you just answer mechanically, giving an answer by rote?

Do you engage interviewers, or just speak to the person who asked the question?

If you answered Yes to most of these questions, you're really just
having problems organizing your interview performance. That could be
lack of practice or lack of training, but it's really pretty easy to
fix these problems.

Tips for sharpening up your interview performance

Each of these tips builds interview skills in stages. They're not
difficult to do. We start with confidence, and move onward, each step
supporting the next.

1. Confidence. Answering interview questions requires clear
thinking and objectivity. There's one basic concept which will greatly
change any problems you're having with communications in interviews:

The interview is about the job: You're talking about business
issues. In "on the job" mode, you naturally communicate clearly, and
explain issues well, using structured statements. That's exactly the
level of communication required at interviews, clear, functional, and
businesslike. If you put your mind into "on the job" mode, rather than
"interview" mode, you'll do a lot better at your interviews. Your
interview performance will be very much closer to your job performance.

2. Presentation. Your presentation is important at
interviews. Interviewers evaluate behavior. A common, and serious,
problem, in interview performance is the "wooden interviewee syndrome"
in which interviewees don't act naturally, but in a forced,
uncomfortable, manner. This can undermine presentation severely. To
correct this behavior, the solution is simple:

Be yourself: The employer needs to see a person, not a sort
of human answering machine, to evaluate the interviewee's fit into the
role. Personality can be a good interview tool. It's also very helpful
in establishing good levels of communications with the interviewers.

3. "Engaging the interviewers". This is another common
behavioral issue where many interviewees get lost. Engaging the
interviewers means having a meaningful, conversation-like, dialog:

Make direct contact with interviewers. This means speaking to
them directly, like a conversation, not a recital. Make eye contact,
and stay in contact with the interview panel while speaking.

4. Showing your experience and expertise. Some experienced people don't even mention their experience:

A credible job candidate shows relevant experience, and highlights achievements.
You can also show expertise by asking the interviewers questions, when
necessary. Your questions prove you know your work. In some cases
interview questions need clarification, so you can also show your
situational awareness skills.